Customized pharmaceutical products aim to comply with the individual needs of a patient to enhance the treatment outcome. The current pharmaceutical production paradigm is, however, dominated by mass production, where the pharmaceutical products embrace a one-size-fits-all design with a low possibility of treatment optimization to patient needs. This production paradigm is not designed or intended for customized pharmaceutical products and operating this production context for customized pharmaceutical products is argued to be cost-inefficient. To address this challenge of inefficient production of customized pharmaceutical products, this study proposes an approach to modular pharmaceutical product design. As a mass customization strategy, product modularization enables serving customers with customized products cost-efficiently. The proposed modular pharmaceutical products integrate three product design requirements originating from patient needs: a scalable dose strength, a flexible target release profile, and a scalable treatment size. An approach to assess the value of these product designs is presented, by means of proposing three benefit metrics complying with respective design requirements and a cost metric assessing the cost of producing these modular pharmaceutical product designs. Results suggest that pharmaceutical product modularization can, by keeping the number of produced components low, substantially increase the external product variety and, hence, enhance the treatment outcome of patients. Furthermore, results indicate that the achieved benefit for the patient through product modularization increases beyond additional costs arising during production. However, a careful modularization must be performed to optimize the tradeoff between the increased benefit and cost.

中文翻译：

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医药产品模块化作为一种​​大规模定制策略，以经济高效地增加患者利益

定制药品旨在满足患者的个性化需求，以提高治疗效果。然而，当前的药品生产范式以大规模生产为主，其中药品采用一刀切的设计，针对患者需求进行治疗优化的可能性很低。这种生产范式不是为定制药品设计的，也不是为定制药品而设计的，并且为定制药品运营这种生产环境被认为是成本低效的。为了解决定制药品生产效率低下的挑战，本研究提出了一种模块化药品设计方法。作为一种大规模定制策略，产品模块化能够以成本效益的方式为客户提供定制产品。提议的模块化药物产品整合了源自患者需求的三个产品设计要求：可扩展的剂量强度、灵活的目标释放曲线和可扩展的治疗规模。提出了一种评估这些产品设计价值的方法，通过提出符合各自设计要求的三个效益指标和一个评估生产这些模块化药物产品设计的成本的成本指标。结果表明，医药产品模块化可以通过减少生产组件的数量，显着增加外部产品的多样性，从而提高患者的治疗效果。此外，结果表明，通过产品模块化为患者带来的好处超出了生产过程中产生的额外成本。